by Carla Kaplan
Leonard was the descendant of America’s economic elite. His father, Philip Rhinelander, was an important figure in New York’s real estate world and the arts. Alice Jones was a working-class woman, one of three daughters of George and Elizabeth Jones, British domestics. Elizabeth was white. But George was a “colored” man, or “mulatto.” Alice worked as a domestic, living in or traveling from her parents’ small wood-framed home off an alley in New Rochelle, New York.
Jones and Rhinelander met in 1921 when Leonard was out driving with his friend Carl, an electrician, and they met Alice’s sister Grace on the street. Leonard was initially interested in Grace, but he quickly transferred his affections—and a ring—to Alice. They dated for the next three years. They went to movies. They petted in Leonard’s car. They spent time with Alice’s family in New Rochelle. They also spent a week in the Marie Antoinette, a New York hotel, having sex.
Philip Rhinelander may not have known about the sex, but various sources reported the relationship to him. He tried desperately to separate his son from Alice. First he sent Leonard abroad. Then he installed him on a dude ranch in Arizona. Leonard and Alice exchanged hundreds of love letters, some of them pornographic by the standards of the day—a fact that would come back to haunt Alice later. Through the mail, they became engaged. When Leonard turned twenty-one in 1924, he came into his trust fund, a combination of cash, securities, real estate, and jewelry worth over $4 million in today’s dollars. He returned and married Alice in a quiet civil ceremony in the New Rochelle courthouse on October 13, 1924. Within a month, news of their marriage hit the newspapers and a tempest erupted when the papers reported that a Rhinelander had married a “colored” woman. “Blueblood Weds Colored Girl.” “Social Registerites Stunned at Mixed Marriage.” Philip Rhinelander sought an annulment of his son’s marriage claiming that Leonard had been deceived about Alice’s race.
After a lengthy set of trials, the court denied the annulment on the grounds that Leonard must have known that his bride was not white. The most extraordinary moment in an extraordinary trial came on November 23 when Alice—at that moment one of the richest women in America—was forced to disrobe to the waist so that the judge, lawyers, and all-male, all-white jury could determine, from their own examination of her naked body and breasts, if Leonard might have been deceived about Alice’s race. The black community immediately responded to the forced disrobing, which put Alice “into a long line of women of color who have had their bodies, literally and figuratively, put on trial,” and which reasserted the one-drop rule of blackness and the notion of racial “telltales.” Among others, Du Bois expressed his outrage in The Crisis that the courts would so “persecute, ridicule and strip naked, soul and body, this defenseless girl.” The press coverage was relentless. The New York Times alone published more than eighty articles on the case. On some days, the spectators struggling “to get into the court had become a small riot.”
Alice Jones Rhinelander’s forced disrobing in court was an unthinkable humiliation for a woman; the New York Evening Graphic’s composographic image depicting this incident was the first faked photograph in journalism.
To bolster its claim that Leonard had been seduced and sexually “enslaved” by Alice, the prosecution read the couple’s love letters in court, including letters that detailed practices, such as cunnilingus, considered “unnatural.” The prosecuting attorney, Isaac Mills, went on to depict the marriage as “unnatural” in every way. “There is not a mother among your wives,” he commented to the white men of the jury, “who would not rather see her daughter with her white hands crossed in her shroud than see her locked in the embrace of a mulatto husband.”
Alice won the case and prevailed over an appeals process that dragged out for the next two years. The court did not accept that Leonard had been “deceived” into marrying her. It was clear that he had known of her “taint” all along. Leonard disappeared and tried to file for divorce in Nevada. The court had to force the Rhinelander family to pay Alice her settlement money: a lump sum of $31,500 plus $3,600 a year (equivalent to roughly $380,000 and $45,000 a year today). A key provision of the settlement was that Alice promise to leave Leonard alone and never use the Rhinelander name for any purpose.
Alice’s victory was pyrrhic. She had lost her marriage. She had lost her claim to whiteness; she was now known as that “colored” girl who married a Rhinelander. And she could no longer be considered a decent woman; she was remembered as the half-naked woman examined by a panel of men. Even the sex lives of prostitutes were less exposed than Alice’s brief time with Leonard. The Ku Klux Klan went after her with all the vehemence it reserved for those it considered passers, those who tried to sneak into whiteness. Alongside some supportive letters from blacks, Alice received huge quantities of hate mail, much of it violent and threatening. She never remarried and mostly lived with her parents for the rest of their lives, using part of her settlement money to help them buy their small home.
Leonard died of pneumonia in 1936 at the age of thirty-four. Alice had to return to court to again force the Rhinelanders to honor her legal settlement. She died in 1989 and is buried with her family in New Rochelle. Her headstone, in defiance, reads “Alice J. Rhinelander.”
Newspaper readers in 1925 would have had no trouble drawing the obvious conclusion: that this was how black women—or even women suspected of being black—should expect to be treated if they crossed race lines. The citizenry was warned to be exactly what they were and not try to become—or pass as—anything else.
That was the dark side of the decade: a violently enforced insistence that people were only one thing and nothing else and ugly anxieties about racial differences that were always present, even—sometimes especially—when they were unseen. Part of what was jazzing up the famously frenetic twenties was that taxonomic fever, a nearly obsessive mania for putting people into categories and demanding loyalty to them. The Rhinelander case was just the tip of an enormous, nasty iceberg.
Fueled by the astounding growth of the Ku Klux Klan, racial violence exploded in the aftermath of World War I. From riots in Washington, D.C., Tulsa, Rosewood, East St. Louis, Chicago, and elsewhere to lynchings (fifty-one in 1922; seventeen in 1925) to police harassment of interracial couples to the firebombing of dozens of black homes in white neighborhoods, violence enforced the racial status quo. As an “instrument of social discipline,” lynchings in that period “became increasingly sadistic and spectacularized,” with images of racial violence disseminated widely on picture postcards and in newspapers. Nativist anti-immigration sentiment was strengthened by this climate, and groups such as the American Legion proclaimed the ideal of an all-white, nonimmigrant nation. “We want and need every One Hundred Per Cent American. And to hell with the rest of them,” trumpeted American Legion Commander Frederic Galbraith. Countless social sectors—journalism, academia, radio, politics, and “Americanization” organizations—seemed equally hell-bent on extending segregation’s legal and economic reach by portraying any movement across racial lines as unnatural. While other sexual and social taboos were falling by the wayside in that legendarily rebellious time, rigid racial lines were being drawn more sharply than at almost any other period in American history. Never before or since has the color line been treated with quite such Janus-faced hysteria. White women who crossed race lines must have expected to be singled out as bad social examples.
Most Americans in the 1920s remembered Etta Duryea, black prizefighter Jack Johnson’s first wife. Duryea was a well-off, white Brooklyn socialite when she met Johnson at a racetrack and fell in love with him. In 1912, only a couple of years into their marriage, she killed herself above the nightclub they co-owned. Newspapers treated her life as a lesson in the “inevitable” fate awaiting race-crossers. The New York World insisted that an early death was “preordained” for any “girl of gentle breeding” who cast her lot with blacks. Suicide was the logical outcome for a “woman without a race,” the paper editorialized. Several repor
ters remarked that Duryea’s death proved that white women did not belong in the black community. Duryea had already said as much. “‘Even the Negroes don’t respect me,’ she had complained; ‘They hate me.’” Her mother insisted that Etta had been insane to marry Johnson. Killing herself was an act “not of temporary madness, but of ultra-lucidness,” Etta’s only sane act since crossing the color line, her mother stated.
Jack Johnson’s marriage to Etta Duryea caused a scandal. Many people were shocked when Johnson married another white woman only weeks after Duryea’s suicide.
Rigidity, however, always encourages escape. Racial passing increased dramatically in the twenties. Some papers claimed that five thousand people a year were “crossing the color line” to join the “white fold.” Others estimated twenty thousand. One put the number as unrealistically high as seventy-five thousand people a day in Philadelphia alone. Sociologist Charles S. Johnson, the founding editor of Opportunity and later president of Fisk College, calculated that 355,000 blacks had passed between 1900 and 1920 and that blacks were leaving the race at the rate of ten thousand a year. Those reports fueled the fear that economic inequality was pushing blacks across “the color line.” Such crossing, many whites worried, was becoming increasingly difficult to detect. The matter of knowing “when . . . a Caucasian [is] not a Caucasian” was becoming “a conundrum which is no joke,” one agitated reporter wrote. Failure to enforce “the color line,” Americans were warned, would lead to social chaos and worse: unknown relatives lynched, “pure white” wives revealed as “colored,” white women birthing black babies. Editorials suggested how to stop passers. Various tricks were offered to tell “authentic” whites from fake whites and rout out passers. The so-called “telltales”—“fingernails, palms of hands, shapes of ears, teeth, and other equally silly rot”—are hard to take seriously now. But they were deadly serious then, as Alice Jones found out.
The novel of passing—which traces a character’s journey across the color line—became especially important in the years leading up to the Harlem Renaissance, partly as a way to respond to those strict ideas of absolute racial identity. It was a not a new form. In the hands of white writers, such as Mark Twain, the genre had provided decades of dire warnings about the catastrophic social consequences attendant on the unethical behavior of racial passers, characters who selfishly pretended to be what they were not. But in the hands of black writers, beginning with Charles Chesnutt in 1900, the story of passing took a very different direction, indicting a society that denies privileges to blacks by celebrating the successful black passer as a folk hero and at the same time depicting the white world as one not worth the trouble of trying to get into. In black novels of passing, racial detection proves nearly impossible because race is merely a set of social behaviors and ideas, not a fixed essence to be ferreted out by telltales. Hence, the black novel of passing battled both racial hierarchies and the pseudoscience of “hypodescent,” the “one-drop rule,” which held that any amount of so-called black blood, “any known African ancestry,” made a person black.
The “one-drop rule” treated blackness as “a contaminant that overwhelms white ancestry” if not contained, a contagion that could threaten, even darken, whites who came too close. It created a profound asymmetry in understandings of whiteness and blackness. Blacks could no longer whiten over time. But the merest proximity to blackness threatened to “blacken” whites, white women especially. The 1930 U.S. census reinforced the “one-drop rule” by dropping the category “mulatto.” That forced every American to choose either black or white but not both. Since greater numbers of people without so-called black visual markers were now classified as black, the increasingly stringent classification schemes actually increased the ease of passing as white, an irony that black novels of passing were quick to parody.
Ideas of absolute racial identity were especially challenging to Harlem’s leaders, who, understandably, advocated racial loyalty. Harlem’s leaders wanted to debunk the various “blood” myths upon which racial taxonomies were based, but they also wanted to celebrate the unique aspects of black culture that were most worth preserving and encourage racial allegiance.
Harlem’s dynamic “race pride”—so central to its art and its politics—was built on revaluing, not repudiating, race differences. Alain Locke, the editor of the most important anthology of the period and an influential force throughout the Harlem Renaissance, maintained that “race pride” and “racial solidarity” were prerequisite to any improvement in national race relations. So did W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and many others. But it was not always clear what constituted loyalty. Some Harlem leaders believed strongly in essential, immutable differences between black and white. Marcus Garvey, the charismatic, bombastic, self-educated Jamaican leader of the Black Nationalist “back-to-Africa” Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), even made common cause with white segregationist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, based on their shared “opposition to race mixture” and commitment to the idea of distinct, “pure” races. Garvey’s insistence on “the racial purity of both the Negro and white races” led him to label the NAACP a “miscegenation organization” and put him sharply at odds with Du Bois, who discouraged interracial marriages but also considered Garvey a “traitor” for allying with groups such as the Klan. Even those who considered ideas of pure race to be mere “superstitions” also acknowledged that for “men and women who lived race as a daily identity, the notion that race was nothing more than an illusion was personally disconcerting; it was also politically perilous because . . . ‘it called into question the very basis of black unity.’”
It was not uncommon, therefore, to both argue against fundamental differences between races and, at the same time, advocate for tolerance of the profound, innate differences between them. Many in Harlem found both views equally appealing. Yet racial “loyalty” remained as prized as its meaning proved elusive. Even those who most vociferously opposed notions of blood-based or biological racial essence also accepted the proposition that race was an ethics, that they owed something to other blacks. Those who refused to be classed with “their” people—such as the biracial writer Jean Toomer, who asked not to be included in any anthologies of “Negro” literature—were sharply denounced. On the other hand, anyone who might have passed but did not—such as the blue-eyed, blond NAACP leader Walter White—was lionized as an example of admirable racial behavior. “Voluntary Negroes,” they were called. Only the most radical race thinkers eschewed racial loyalty altogether. Zora Neale Hurston and George Schuyler built their reputations on provoking the line between racial loyalty and “treason,” sometimes suggesting that the best—even the only—way to be loyal to “the race” was to blast its pretensions and make it self-critical. But among Harlem’s intellectuals, few were as effusive about their love of blackness—and black people—as Hurston and Schuyler. Straddling this tension between Harlem’s official identity politics and personal feelings of racial belonging was the norm throughout the twenties.
This was not, then, an altogether auspicious time or an opportune set of circumstances for white women to cross race lines. Whether they wanted to socialize interracially, support or organize black communities, represent blacks in literature and the arts, be intimate with black men or raise black children, or pass as black, there was little social support for their straying. Their behavior cut to the heart of what Walter White called the “great peal of implacable Negrophobia” by challenging the categorizations on which it was based. But it also threatened to expose cultural contradictions in Harlem. For many, what I call Harlem’s erotics of race—feelings of identity and belonging at odds with the critique of essential identity—was a guilty pleasure, a retreat into feelings that there were good reasons not to broadcast or admit too freely. When white women expressed their own longings for color and an escape from whiteness—“make me yellow . . . bronze . . . or black,” as Edna Margaret Johnson prayed in her “White Gir
l’s Prayer”—they deepened what was already a troubling set of contradictions. By the antiessentialist logic favored in Harlem’s intellectual circles, there was no logical reason to deny such whites entry. Indeed, their affiliation would have to be seen positively, as an act of solidarity. But by all the cultural and emotional values that most blacks held dear, white women’s “crossover” claims to blackness were awkward and largely unwelcome. The status of “voluntary Negro” had never been meant for them. And the powerful desire for blackness that so many of them felt—Miss Anne’s own particular erotics of race—always threatened to expose a contradiction in racial thinking that very few Harlemites wanted to see aired.
On both sides of the color line, then, Miss Anne was a nuisance. Whenever possible, the white press tried to ignore the white women of Harlem. When it could not do so, it sexualized and sensationalized them. If that did not work, they were characterized as monstrous or insane, socially and culturally unintelligible. Because their mere presence in Harlem put pressure on some of Harlem’s most vexed contradictions, Harlem’s response to these women was not always that different from mainstream white America’s.
“What Is Africa to Me?”: The Question of Ancestral Heritage
I was only an American Negro—who had loved the surface of Africa and the rhythms of Africa—but I was not Africa.
—Langston Hughes
I Was African.
—Nancy Cunard
As Harlem’s leaders looked for a reasonable foundation for shared identity, the question of whether or not Africa was a “usable past” for contemporary African Americans loomed especially large. It was also a vexed question. On the one hand, Africa represented cultural wealth from which blacks had been violently estranged and that they then decided to reclaim. But many found the idea that Africa was a heritage for American blacks questionable at best. Hughes criticized the notion, but he also traveled to Africa to explore it, and he expressed it in poems that bathed their speakers in the Congo and Mississippi rivers, poems where the low beating of African “tom-toms / stirs” the blood of modern black cosmopolitans and poems that might posit that “So far away / Is Africa / Not even memories alive,” even as they insist that crucial vestiges persist—“yet / Through some vast mist of race / There comes this song.” Alain Locke also tried to have it both ways, releasing American blacks from any obligatory ties to Africa while preserving a claim to its rich cultural legacy. “There is little evidence of any direct connection of the American Negro with his ancestral arts,” he admitted, even as he insisted that they were “his” ancestral arts, part of his “emotional inheritance.” George Schuyler, less ambivalent, declared the notion “hokum” and maintained that “your American Negro is just plain American.”